Analogical Medievalism and Transatlantic Races: A Response to Andrew Galloway

Aside from the reproof I feel at someone who, though trained outside my field, is so good at reading American poetry, Andrew Galloway’s excursus on Bryant’s The Prairies puts me in mind of an experience I had months ago while leading a study abroad trip in England. Taking us through a high saddle in the hills just north of Grasmere, our coach driver, David, pointed out to me an example of British architecture distinct from the survey of Georgian facades, Norman chapels, and Tudor manors to which he had been alerting us for weeks. “That,” he said, pointing to a tiny concrete cube placed in the distant bracken, “is a pillbox built early in the war.” Taking in the implications of the pillbox rather stunned me. Its placement this far north was owing to what had once seemed the real possibility that everything south of the Lake District—London, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds—would eventually fall to the Nazis, and that English civilization, then having relocated to Scotland and facing a final German push northward, would make its last stand here, at this geographically-strategic pass. This place, not far from where Emerson had once called to pay his respects to both Wordsworth and Coleridge, was to have been the site of England’s last moment.

The moment got to me, I will admit, in the perhaps lurid manner of a program on The History Channel; recollections of the Second World War as a defense of civilization itself now enjoy widespread currency in both the US and the UK, after all. Such historiographies share something with the historicist mode Galloway finds behind The Prairies, devising dramas of racial displacement wherein waves of invaders submit the British Isles to cycles of biological contest and transformation. Indeed, in just such terms did similar narratives of premodern British racial displacement become implicated in antebellum America’s habits of thought as it constructed its own broad narratives of national origin. Bryant’s American medievalism, as Galloway demonstrates in fascinating ways, forwarded for the US a prehistory of societal-scale displacement and extinction that itself provided a historical typology for Indian displacement, and in this way, The Prairies provides cover not only for Bryant’s views on the removal but for the wider implications of the Van Buren administration’s policies toward the Cherokee Nation. As a (perhaps) Jacksonian meditation on the destruction of an entire civilization, The Prairies stands with plenty of (perhaps) Jacksonian company. First concocting what it will then eulogize—this diasporic “race” drawn from the classical and the medieval, and constituting what Galloway describes as “a skilfull, heroic, and rebelliously populist world separated from us by corrupt and tyrannical conquerors”— The Prairies speaks the same language, for instance, as Thomas Cole’s series The Course of Empire, which Cole began in 1834, just after the publication of The Prairies and as debates over Indian removal intensified. Cole’s five canvases depict the rise and fall of an imaginary civilization from pastoral idyll through decadent zenith and then into violent overthrow and ruin. Though the grandeur of the imaginary city visualized in Cole’s third canvas, The Consummation of Empire, suggests through its Roman architecture (if not its bacchanalian carnival) Republican Washington, the civilization finally annihilated in the penultimate canvas, The Destruction of Empire, is of course neither Roman nor American, but simply and allegorically native, the victim of a sudden and ferocious alien incursion.

There are other works to point to here as well, but though such creative efforts to first conjure and then memorialize some displaced civilization may have reverberated with 1830s’ debates over Indian Removal, they also anticipated a broader set of uses around which antebellum public intellectuals would organize much European “history”; the “medieval” mode through which Bryant imagined the mound-builders, we might say, foreran other interests especially in the biological skein of premodern Britain. During the 1840s and 1850s, histories of English ethnic conflict would gain a currency not only among American expansionists like Bryant but also among those English historians who were honing their own narratives of racial...